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Comment by Tijdreiziger | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t think anything is weird anymore. The ultimate reality of free will is that you will always have the option to do right and wrong. If you don’t have faith, this privilege will be difficult. The human left to their own devices will always have a shifting sense of morality (turning a ship by 1 degree at a time).

I think this hypothesis is flawed.

I think most people in society strive to do right, and therefore most of us are able to live in relative peace and with relative trust in our fellow members of society.

There are some people who do wrong, but we’ve set up our society to strive to detect this and punish those (albeit using imperfect systems and knowledge, leading to false positives and negatives).

Therefore, I think religions are an encoding of human morality, not the other way around.

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I'd challenge your position with a simple thought experiment. You're given a device with a button. When you push that button a random person you don't know will be killed. In exchange you'll receive $1 million in completely clean money, and nobody will ever know you pushed the button or how many times you pushed it.

So how many times would you push it? Such is our character that asking how many times you'd push it is far more interesting than asking if you'd push it. And asking how many times you'd push it also gets rid of the marginal utility argument, and just to the dirty self centered core of humanity.

People without any static set of values will trend towards doing whatever they want and then justifying it afterwards. There will undoubtedly be a guy who pushes it thousands of times, and then donates a fraction of it to charity, convincing himself that he's actually saved lives on net. That is humanity in a nutshell.

> Such is our character that asking how many times you'd push it is far more interesting than asking if you'd push it.

Is that a royal "Our"? I don't think you are speaking for anyone but yourself. People like Trump, MSB and Netanyahu aren't normal. They tend to abuse religion as a justification for their actions rather than spititual inspiration.

What if you were a Christian, and you knew that the random person being killed was a rock solid Christian who would die painlessly and without even knowing it, and would go immediately into the bosom of Christ?

In that scenario pushing the button seems like the right thing to do. If you don't, that person might lose their faith later and end up in hell, and it would be your fault. What is the worth of a soul? My understanding is it's infinite. If not infinite, certainly it must be worth more than a measly cool million.

> If you don't, that person might lose their faith later and end up in hell, and it would be your fault

Have you read the Bible? Jesus would disagree with this take very hard. Or do you have any support for this moral argument from any of the apostles?

Yes I've read the Bible cover to cover multiple times (although admittedly on the second and third time through I did skim a bit of the last 1/3 of the OT rather than reading it for diligent comprehension), and have taken a number of different courses on it. I've read the New Testament at least a dozen times through, plus many years of Sunday School looking at different books/passages.

> Jesus would disagree with this take very hard.

Citation needed for that. This is something hotly debated among all sorts of Christians so I don't claim to have a solid answer, but perseonally I think the Bible is repeatedly pretty clear that you can lose it[1].

I used to be a strong believer, but no longer am. Out of curiosity, do you think I'm going to Hell or am I still all set for (eternal) life because of my past faith?

[1]: https://www.biblestudyguide.org/articles/salvation/salvation...

Personally, I would take a strictly utilitarian approach. If I thought I could save >1 life for $1 million, I would press the button. The number of presses would depend solely on the number of lives I think I (or a humanitarian organization) could save with the money.

I think that most people with a moral compass would either take this approach, or would not press the button at all.

I think your second paragraph is misguided and reveals an overly pessimistic view of the nature of humanity. (Such is the nature of cynics: they always think everyone else is just as cynical as they are.)

> People without any static set of values will trend towards doing whatever they want and then justifying it afterwards.

Religious people aren’t immune from that, and conversely, it’s not necessary to be religious to have moral values.

edit: I thought about this some more. I think that the button problem is equivalent to the trolley problem (provided you can save >1 life with $1 million, as above).

No, it's the perfect example because we can't help but rationalize a way to justify pushing it. If you now gave every single person that button, humanity would be extinct within minutes - many of them rationalizing that they're saving humanity.

This is the heart of where the saying that power corrupts comes from. It's not that power corrupts but that these sort of decisions are ones that will never be available to anybody without power. Yet for those with power it's not that far away from many practical scenarios. In other words, we start corrupt, but our impotence mitigates the relevance of that. Power just reveals our character.

And no, religious people are obviously not immune from this, but with a fixed set of values rationalization becomes far more farcical than without. The Bible's position on homicide, let alone for personal gain, is unambiguous. A person without any set of fixed values, by contrast, will have no problem justifying and rationalizing even the most egregious acts, so long as the reward is seen as desirable enough.

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To respond to your edit, consider that you're basically doing a version of the trolley problem where you have the choice to redirect the track from killing one person, to killing two, but you get a million bucks for doing so. And you're now arguing that this is the utilitarian choice. It's plainly a false rationalization, but we can so easily convince ourselves that it's reasonable. Our extreme strength at rationalization is humanity's biggest moral and ethical failing. [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h242eDB84zY

> To respond to your edit, consider that you're basically doing a version of the trolley problem where you have the choice to redirect the track from killing one person, to killing two, but you get a million bucks for doing so.

No, this is definitely not right.

Consider first the non-repeated case. There are two possibilities:

1. You do not press the button. Nothing changes about the world.

2. You press the button and donate $1 million to a humanitarian organization. A random person dies, but the humanitarian organization uses the money to save an average of 5 others.

Option 1 is like not pulling the lever, thereby letting the trolley run over 5 people. Option 2 is like pulling the lever, thereby saving 5 people, but letting the trolley run over another.

(From this, the repeated case trivially follows.)

However, as you allude to, the button problem has a third option: press the button and keep the $1 million. This is so cartoonishly diabolical that only a sociopath would do it. If this was how most people acted, nobody would ever help anybody else, we would all be looking for opportunities to stab each other in the back, and we would most likely not even have developed such a nebulous concept as ‘morality’.

This is what I alluded to with my remark about cynics: the cynic is negative, and therefore, thinks that everyone else is negative too. However, this reveals more about the cynic than it does about humanity (at least, I hope so; I am an optimist who likes to have faith in humanity).

> And no, religious people are obviously not immune from this, but with a fixed set of values rationalization becomes far more farcical than without. The Bible's position on homicide, let alone for personal gain, is unambiguous. A person without any set of fixed values, by contrast, will have no problem justifying and rationalizing even the most egregious acts, so long as the reward is seen as desirable enough.

Many, many wars were and are fought for religious reasons. The Christian Church itself has famously fought multiple religious wars (IIUC, so has the Islamic prophet). Considering this, I really don’t think religion gets to take the high ground when it comes to ‘having fixed values’.

But can't you see what you're doing? You're simply rationalizing everything, repeatedly, until you find a reason to press the button. To the point that you're convincing yourself that in the scenario where you're literally killing people for money, that you're actually saving people.

And what you're doing is what humanity naturally does. The people we view as awful in history certainly acknowledged they're doing some awful things in the present, but rationalized it by imagining the utopia that it will bring in. In their minds not only were they behaving ethically, but they were practically a martyr fit for Sainthood, as they are taking the burden, the stain, of such actions upon themselves, only to help an unimaginable number of people in the future. Really it was just charity at unimaginable cost to themselves.

Of course that utopia of the future never comes to pass, but the horrible things they do in the present always do. Such is the nature of humanity that we'll always find a reason to press the button. It's not about 'good' or 'evil' or anything of the sort. Rationalization enables a good person to do the most evil of things, and feel fine about it.

I think the only way to combat this issue is with static values. That can take many forms ranging from religion to a distinct and well defined personal philosophy. But I think anybody lacking such a structured system (from whatever source) will always succumb to rationalization.

I’m simply saying that the problem is almost exactly equivalent to the trolley problem.

Would you steer the trolley to the track with one man on it? If yes, and you believe you could save more than one person with $1 million, then you would also press the button!

> And what you're doing is neither novel nor surprising. This is the exact rationalization most of every person we now view in history as awful also used. They acknowledge they're doing some awful things in the present, but rationalize it by imagining the utopia that it will bring in.

This is also true for the trolley problem! He who pulls the lever does an awful thing (kills one man) in the pursuit of some benefit to society (saving five others).

(The ethics of the trolley problem itself have been discussed at length, so I don’t think we need to repeat those arguments here.)

And again, many religious wars have been and are fought! Religious leaders haven’t theoretically killed people in the pursuit of utopia, they have literally, actually done that!

After all: that’s the subject of our discussion: not whether people are moral, but whether religious people are more moral than the baseline.

I'm not saying you don't believe what you're saying. On the contrary that is again probably the worst part of rationalization. We genuinely believe what we convince ourselves of, while imagining ourselves to be objectively and plainly correct. As for morality and religion, it's well accepted (at least academically) that there is a significant correlation between religiosity and reduced asocial behavior at the individual level. This [1] study is a meta-study of some 109 other studies and offers a broad overview.

Keep in mind that the obvious exceptions like South America = high religiosity + high criminality or Scandiland = low religiosity + low criminality, are group/macro level issues and not individual. Very small numbers of highly sociopathic individuals or groups can have an extreme effect on overall stats. For example the homicide rate for St. Louis is higher than for any country in the world, yet obviously the percent of people of homicidal tendency in St. Louis is negligible. Macro level stats and individual level tendencies are very different things.

[1] - https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/41333/chapter/3523552...

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